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Saturday, March 26, 2016

Welcoming The Media Imagination in Nigerian Foreign Policy

Commentary@ITRealms:

The recent visit of President
Jacob Zuma of South Africa to Nigeria presented an opportunity to rehash the
view that Nigeria has not been given its due recognition in Africa. Of course,
as expected, Mr. Zuma in his speech to the joint session of Nigeria’s National
Assembly did touch on Nigeria’s role in the fight against Apartheid and its
historical role in Africa. According to Mr. Zuma, “The people of Nigeria
provided unwavering support and solidarity to the people of South Africa to
unseat the last bastion of colonialism in Africa and enable us to attain our
freedom.”

In what appears to be a veiled
reference to attacks on Nigerians in South Africa he noted, “I would like to
remind especially the youth in our two countries, of the role that Nigeria
played in the struggle for liberation in South Africa. Nigeria was very
instrumental in establishing, in the 1960s and the chairing, for 25 years, the
United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid, and further hosted a UN
anti-apartheid conference in 1977. From the mid-70s, Nigeria and its people
also hosted some of the exiled freedom fighters from South Africa, with numbers
increasing after the Soweto Student Uprising in 1976.”

It appears, however, that beyond
these formal platforms and speeches eulogizing Nigeria, the image of the
country as a “powerhouse” deserving of respect, particularly in Africa, is
simply lacking. We must again refer to the repeated xenophobic attacks against Nigerians
in South Africa and, of course, the way Nigerians are perceived and treated in
other African countries.

This brings us to the other side
of the debate: whether Nigeria has asserted herself enough to be taken
seriously in Africa much less the world. This is what a new book, The Media Imagination in Nigerian Foreign
Policy seeks to address. Written by Adagbo Onoja, a former media aide to Sule
Lamido, Nigeria’s foreign affairs minister between 1999 and 2003, the author
weaves three aspects of his persona into this book – journalist, academic, and
participant-observer in Nigeria’s foreign policy – to highlight what Nigeria
has still not explored: the postmodern media.

Described
on the blurb by one of the academic assessors as “empirically rich, pugnacious
here and there”, it would be interesting to see how the myriad of its potential
readers react to this book. And they would range from newsrooms across the
world assessed on their coverage of Nigerian foreign policy to the civil
society that has a whole chapter in the work and then to African statesmen, the
great powers, former ministers of foreign affairs and other key actors in
Nigerian foreign policy as well as those called “intellectuals of statecraft”.

It would be
interesting to see too what readers also make of sharp assertions as the one by
Professor Sam Egwu of the University of Jos (UNIJOS) who remarked in the Foreword
that “The critical role of the media in
the projection of great nations historically provides a warning that the media
imagination matters and that the foreign policy elite ignore the media
imagination as a power resource only at the perils of the country.”

In many respect, this book is a
welcome development not just in media discourse but in framing a comprehensive
and workable foreign policy for the country. When it comes to Nigeria, the
expectations are really high – both within and outside the country: “The Giant
of Africa”, “the most populous country in Africa”, “the largest concentration
of Black people in the world”. Unfortunately, the country and its leaders have
not come anywhere close to fulfilling the potentials of the country.

Divided
into three parts with seven chapters, the book focuses on two main issues:
“what the media does to Nigeria’s image and how Nigeria might derive strategic
advantage from the media imagination”. Contrary to the generalized belief that
Nigeria’s media image is all negative, this work shows that there is also the
idea of Nigeria as “the pivot on which Africa and much of the world turn”, a
discourse with tremendous constitutive implications which Nigeria has not
explored.

Subsequently,
the image of a looted and mismanaged country afflicted by a litany of woes: corruption,
high degree of poverty, HIV/AIDS infection, a dysfunctional society, authoritarian
democracy, criminality, and scams, has overwritten the positive possibilities. Essentially,
the author is saying that our foreign policy has underachieved partly because Nigeria
has left the discursive articulation of herself unattended by way of her
engagement with the media as a power resource. While Nigeria does not seek to
dominate other countries, as the author noted, its “asymmetrical diplomacy” or the
articulation of foreign policy objectives on the terms of externally framed
meaning of the world has left gaps between foreign policy and domestic interests
or needs.

For
me, this focus by the author on the media imagination in Nigerian foreign
policy is the kernel of the book; that is, the strength of the book is the
understanding and application of the power of the media in pushing a narrative
of Nigeria within which other foreign policy interests can be realized. This is
a refreshing perspective that the framers of Nigeria’s foreign policy may do
well to listen to. Very few writers and academics in Nigeria have bothered to
explore this angle in foreign policy discourse. The work is equally authoritative.
As Comrade John Odah, one of those who needled the author to complete the book,
was reported in the acknowledgement, very few people with critical orientation
have had the opportunity to ply the Nigerian foreign pitch at the level of a
close political rather than career aide of the ministers of foreign affairs.

The question emanating from Onoja’s
critical ability and close contact with the implementers of Nigeria’s foreign is:
how systematically has Nigeria seized the media imagination as a power
resource? In answering this question, the author argues that the media as a
power resource in Nigeria’s foreign policy can at best be described as work in
progress. He concludes by noting that the Nigerian State has not deployed the
media the way it deploys the military, diplomacy, intelligence and similar
instruments of state power.

The solutions: deliberate
development of media infrastructure “with capacity to tell the Nigerian story
on a global scale”, taking advantage of the advances in media and information
technology, and building a crop of media practitioners with an “Afrocentric
appreciation of history”. I think these are brilliant interventions. The
shortcoming, if any, of this book is how to put some of these ideas into
practice or better still why have these ideas not started taking roots after
more than two decades since the postmodern media became a reality? How, for
example, can Nigeria build a crop of media practitioners with an “Afrocentric
appreciation of history” when history is not taught in Nigerian schools, much
less an Afrocentric sense of it?

But beyond our disdain for
history is a more fundamental question of the character of the Nigerian nation
or state which the author ignores. The author’s lack of attention, considering
his pedigree as a progressive scholar and activist, to the fact that Nigeria is
an “unformed entity” and that this has a direct bearing of its foreign policy
is difficult to fathom. It is not just for nothing that Nigeria has no coherent
and workable foreign policy. I think there is a way in which the geo-politics
of Nigeria has impacted the way Nigeria projects itself or responds to
international issues. There can’t be any genuine understanding of what ails
Nigeria, including its foreign policy woes, without a focus or an understanding
of the nature of our federation.

In all, this is a provocative
book and if we want to understand why Nigeria remains an African paper tiger,
then we must turn to the 228-page The Media
Imagination in Nigerian Foreign Policy, just published
by theCentre for Information
Technology and Development (CITAD).

This book will stir interest and
debates and I think it should. As Dr. Chijioke Uwasomba of the Department of
English, Obafemi Awolowo University noted on the blurb, it provides “students of
international politics, foreign policy analysts,diplomacy, media practitioners and the sensitive general reader
a critical entry point into the media in foreign policy formulation and
implementation in a post-colonial state like Nigeria”.

*Onumah
is Coordinator of the African Centre for Media & Information Literacy
(AFRICMIL), Abuja, Nigeria. He is the author of Time to Reclaim Nigeria (2011)
and Nigeria is Negotiable (2013). He can be reached at conumah@hotmail.com; Twitter: @conumah